MEASURE

*Exhibition and auction has been extended

 

August 14th, 2015 – September 19th, 2015

Opening: August 13th at 7 pm

Members’ Preview: August 13th at 6 pm

 

To measure, to quantify the physical and intangible dimensions of a place, is to articulate facts in order to construct values. The process of creating standards and guidelines of representation allows innovation to enter the realm of the establishment. What can be measured can be capitalized, historicized, and sold.

 

While architectural representation conforms to a system of standards and guidelines that allows for the production of buildings, architecture is also the practice of giving form to thought. In the process of creating edifices that house social, political, and spatial relations, architects make visible the functions of society in operational and aspirational terms. In this sense, architecture is constantly innovating new forms of measurement and representation.

 

The pleasure and pressure to measure and be measured has become increasingly present. Access to growing data sets and new sensing technologies is widespread, and the role of public and private domains in terms of information and space are being redefined. These contemporary conditions invite us to reflect on our ideologies and values, and the drawing is a manifestation of that which we are able to (and desire to) count, measure, and draw.

 

Measure is an exhibition of newly commissioned drawings by 32 international architects presenting 32 edifices of thought. Drawings are of Storefront for Art and Architecture’s gallery space on 97 Kenmare Street in New York. Architectural representation, which draws upon the diagram as a conceptual and abstract component, has historically been criticized as obscure and self referential. The proliferation of data visualization in popular media today, however, allows us to engage a much larger audience in conversations about measurement and representation. The 32 drawings presented at Storefront unveil the challenges of representation and extrapolate them onto the architect’s table and the gallery walls.

 

Storefront’s third iteration of the drawing show seeks to find measures, resist measurement, and measure the immeasurable by presenting drawings that range from the real to the fictional and from the functional to the symbolic. Measure positions the medium and the act of drawing as a process by which we seek coherence in data and representation, and shows that it is the making of facts that is the basis for the production of futurity beyond existing norms.

 

Participants include:

The Architecture Lobby
Barozzi / Veiga
Víctor Enrich
Fake Industries Architectural Agonism (Urtzi Grau, Cristina Goberna) and Georgia Jamieson
FIG Projects
FleaFollyArchitects

Formlessfinder
Michelle Fornabai
Grimshaw Architects

Steven Holl
Bernard Khoury
Kohn Pedersen Fox Assoc.
KUTONOTUK (Matthew Jull + Leena Cho)
Erika Loana
Jon Lott / PARA Project

MAIO
m-a-u-s-e-r (Mona Mahall + Asli Serbest)
MILLIØNS (John May + Zeina Koreitem)
Nicholas de Monchaux
Anna Neimark and Andrew Atwood / First Office
pneumastudio (Cathryn Dwyre + Chris Perry)
+ POOL
James Ramsey, RAAD Studio
Reiser + Umemoto
Mark Robbins
Selldorf Architects
Malkit Shoshan
Nader Tehrani / NADAAA
Urban-Think Tank
Anthony Titus
Ross Wimer
James Wines

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Each of the 30 drawings in the exhibition will be auctioned throughout the exhibition with proceeds supporting Storefront’s exhibitions and programming. Bid online here.

 

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ON THE FACADE

As part of the exhibition, and on display on the facade gallery walls, Storefront has invited artists to present a series of works that use data to measure and construct new territories and architectural forms. Works range from sculptural to cartographic and from physical to digital.

 

Participants include:

 

Landscapes of Profit by Dan Taeyoung, Caroline Woolard, Chris Henrick, John Krauss, Ingrid Burrington

In the last decade, $23 billion of “flipped” properties have sold in New York City. Property flipping is a practice whereby a recently acquired property is resold, often for a considerable profit.

 

Landscapes of Profit measures the amount of money that would be generated if a 1% surcharge or “tax” were placed on sales of flipped properties, and proposes earmarking this tax for a fund for affordable space. If such a tax had been implemented from 2004 to the present, the tax would have raised an average of $23 million per year from over $23 billion in sales. Last year, it would have raised over $33 million for affordable space.

 

The project positions the recollection of data and its visualization as a form of activism.

 

Landscapes of Profit uses 2003-2015 data from the New York City Department of Finance’s ACRIS (Automated City Register Information System) and the New York City Department of City Planning’s MapPLUTO (Map of Primary Land Use Tax Lot Output). For more information, see http://landscapesofprofit.com.

 

Wage Islands by Ekene Ijeoma

Wage Islands expands on the narrative of New York City’s “tale of two cities” by measuring and revealing inequalities in wages/income and housing. The project is a three-dimensional map of New York’s monthly median housing costs, where the peaks and bases of housing costs are between $271 and $4001.

 

The base represents the entirety of New York City, and data shows that in order for a citizen to pay the average housing costs for the city overall, he or she would need to make an hourly wage of at least $77. The peaks of the map represent the areas of the city where it is possible for an individual to live on a minimum wage of $8.25 based on the average housing costs of those areas.

 

This project reflects the geographies of access in New York City, and seeks to reveal the inherent relationships between housing, income, and inequality.

 

InSeE’ by Citygram: Tae Hong Park, Evan Kent, Sean Lee, Min Joon Yoo

InSeE’, an acronym for Interactive Soundscape Environment, focuses on sonification and visualization of soundscape data captured by sensor network technology captured by the Citygram sensor network system. The project aims to create real-time, dynamic “soundmaps” to augment existing digital cartographic technologies.

 

In this piece, InSeE’ zooms into Storefront for Art and Architecture’s walking area (interior and exterior) to capture soundscape information–noise and spatial-acoustic energies–through immediate, short-term, and long-term dynamic mapping strategies.

 

The installation aims to bring awareness to spatio-temporal and non-ocular measurements through artistic media enabled by a series of sensors located in the gallery.

 

Citygram is an interactive environmental sensing project, that focuses on capturing, mapping, and exploring invisible environmental energies that turn spaces into places.

 

Throughout the gallery, a series of sensors are collecting data regarding the space and the acoustics of the area. This data is used within the various visualizations on display.

 

Dear Data by Giorgia Lupi + Stefanie Posavec

Dear Data is a year-long analog data drawing project by Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec, an Italian and an American who switched continents to live as expats in New York and London, respectively. Stefanie and Giorgia met only twice before beginning this project, and it became a way for them to get to know each other. Every week, they each collect and measure a particular type of personal data. They then each use this data to make a drawing on a postcard and drop it into an English “postbox” (Stefanie) or an American “mailbox” (Giorgia). Eventually, each postcard arrives at the other person’s address featuring the scuff marks of its journey over the ocean: a type of “slow data” transmission. In contrast to mechanical and impersonal gathering of data, Dear Data proposes a slow, manual, deliberately limited, and analog approach.

 

The artists embarked on this project to challenge the increasingly widespread assumption that “big data” is the ultimate and definitive key to unlocking, decoding, and describing people’s public and private lives.

 

The Dear Data project began on September 1, 2014, and runs for a year, after which Stefanie and Giorgia will each have sent 52 fragments of her personality in data to the other.

 

Displayed is a selection of 8 weeks of postcards in which the artists explore the relationship to our surroundings and to physical spaces through the gathering and drawing of data.

 

The entire collection of Dear Data postcards can be found at www.dear-data.com.

 

PLUS ONE by + POOL

PLUS ONE is a visualization by + POOL, an initiative to build a water-filtering floating pool in New York rivers for recreational and ecological purposes. It is an ongoing project that deals with the challenge of filtering actual river water to make it swimmable and safe for the public. The layered filtration system proposed by + POOL removes bacteria and contaminants incrementally to ensure cleaner water.

 

This visualization brings into a single graphic the gradient of data used in the process of designing and conceptualizing + POOL. The project incorporates scales and forms of measurement in many ways, from data regarding microscopic water pollution to assessments of the implications of improved waterways in cities worldwide.

 

Insight by CartoDB: Santiago Giraldo, Aurelia Moser, Andrew Hill

Insight builds on the ideas of abstraction, measurement, and insight through the use of precise community-created data maps. It uses the North Pole Azimuthal Equidistant Projection, a projection generally used in mapping and navigating the Arctic Ocean or northern-most land masses.

 

While it appears to be an abstraction of North and South America, the projection is geographically and mathematically accurate, as its points of distortion focus on the areas of Earth’s curvature that are farthest away from the North Pole. Greenland, for example, appears much smaller than it is typically perceived in more commonly used projections, but this representation conveys a less distorted and more proportionate view of the area.

 

The map design content is a collection of data visualizations and insight maps made by the CartoDB community, a cloud-based mapping, analysis, and visualization platform. The full CartoDB interactive map can be found at www.tinyurl.com/storefrontmap.

 

INSIGHT, THE COMPETITION.

In conjunction with “Measure,” CartoDB will host a competition for data visualizations to be displayed at the Storefront gallery during the exhibition. A monetary prize will be offered to the winning submission.

 

 

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Executive Director and Chief Curator

Eva Franch i Gilabert

Director of Development and Outreach

Jinny Khanduja

Associate Curator

Carlos Mínguez Carrasco

Associate Curator of Archives and Global Networks

Chialin Chou

Development and Communications Associate

Melissa Weisberg

Gallery Manager and Project Coordinator

Max Lauter

Archive Assistant

Ryan J. Simons

Curatorial Fellow

Jessica Ngan

Design Team

Alina Bibisheva, Nerissa Cooney, Ana Garcia Merino, Natalie Mufson, Caterina Viguera